All payment terminal providers and a certain number of third-party providers are capable of providing anti-intrusion solutions of varying degrees of efficiency.
Indeed, the fraudulent individuals constantly increase their ingenuity when trying to circumvent such and such a protection measure.
For obvious reasons of security, the opening of an electronic payment terminal or the intrusion of a foreign element into an electronic payment terminal or again the assembling of a terminal are impermissible operations.
Anti-intrusion measures being proposed include the application of false keys which are used to detect the opening of the terminal. When the terminal is mounted, the keypad of the terminal exerts pressure on the false keys which are therefore in permanent contact with the printed circuit. When the keypad is removed, the false keys are no longer in contact with the printed circuit and the security processor activates the requisite protection measures. One of the problems with these false keys is related to the fact that additional mechanical parts need to be provided on the keypad support to detect the dismantling of the keypad. These additional mechanical parts are costly.
We may also cite the use of lattices for protecting printed circuits to prevent the insertion of probes. A probe generally takes the form of an almost invisible thin metal wire that is inserted into the electronic payment terminal through the bank card insertion slot to access the contacts between the bank card and the card reader (these contacts are also called “pins”).
There are many other existing measures. However, these measures are not always efficient.
One protective solution that can be envisaged is that of preventing the re-assembly of a terminal from parts belonging to other terminals. This solution comes into play when fraudulent individuals try to fabricate or reassemble a terminal. This is a problem complementary to that of intrusion.
To date, there is no approach by which this problem can be resolved for a cost deemed to be reasonable. Indeed, it is theoretically possible to provide the components of the terminal with identification. To this end, each component must be provided with an identifier, for example an RFID, and a security processor installed in the terminal has to be provided with the list of the identifiers of the In addition to being complex this operation also costly since the RFID tags used to identify the components considerably increase the cost of the terminal. Now, it is important to provide payment terminals that users can trust and that are not excessively costly to produce.